Tag: higher education

2012 is almost over. Where is higher education now in regards to these issues?

Re-reading this EDUCAUSE report has made me wonder: what are the Top 10 IT issues for non-profits generally, and information and referral services specifically, for 2013? I’ll be writing about this in the first iteration of my InfoCommons column in the December AIRS Newsletter. This is just a teaser!

One of my favorite past-times is looking up university websites on the Internet Archive and laughing at what they looked like in the beginning. Ironically, it was probably easier to find the information you needed back when things looked like this:

The Web Marketing Association has an award for Best University Website. The Art Institute of Pittsburgh’s site won in 2007, but that version of the site seems to have disappeared. I remember using it once to try to find information about their library. I was impressed by how unconventional the site was, but I couldn’t find basic information I needed. Now the design is different – more structured but still attractive. This is unfortunate, though:

If you need to tell people to use your menu, you've got a problem. And why not just hyperlink all those programs on the main page if you're going to have them there?

I see university websites as portals that must also contain a lot of content themselves, in addition to making a visual statement that conveys whatever the university is trying to emphasize about itself and enhances its brand. Ideally it should be impressive from a technological standpoint, since that in itself is (in my opinion) a statement about the quality of the institution. So basically university websites are probably one of the most challenging type of sites to design. This article from the blog of a design consultancy in Singapore sums it up quite nicely, covering issues of web standards, information architecture, and branding. An excerpt:

University websites tend to be more complicated than corporate websites. Here are some reasons why:

* Difficultly in defining a common vision: unlike corporate websites, it is difficult for a university to get all of its schools, divisions, centers, etc., to agree on a common vision for communicating on the web. This is a classic example of a house-of-brands or a branded-house conflict. Only the administrative offices are under the fold for obvious reasons. Thus, it is not uncommon to come across a school or a division crafting their own vision, often citing the hyper competitive education marketplace as their main reason (e.g. business schools).
* ‘Not invented here’ syndrome: because of the above, web design tends to fall into the hands of many different local webmasters who make decisions based on local directives – usually motivated by one-upmanship. This results in the hotchpotch that users finally get to see, and unfortunately, to experience.
* Lack of knowledge in user-centered design: this is crucial one. Because the needs of the user (or as Don Norman would say, people) does not take center stage, as the above two points show, design decisions are based on varying principles and random rationales leading to haphazard design outcomes. Unless there’s common understanding of user needs this is going to be a problem area for some time to come.

The xkcd comic above apparently started enough of an uproar to merit an article on Inside Higher Ed about the problems with university websites. And university websites don’t have half the problems library websites do thanks to all our different services which may require different interfaces, databases that require authentication which may have to occur on a page that isn’t the library’s, and the entirely separate (though maybe it shouldn’t be) beast that is the OPAC. But those are topics for another day.

At the Business Library I worked at we received a couple letters asking for information about starting a business, writing a business plan, etc. This was also a common request in the letters I read while working with Book ‘Em, Pittsburgh’s books-to-prisoners program. It’s hard to know how to respond to these requests since not a many of the best resources on the topic could be condensed into something you could send to an inmate (because of postage, restrictions on number/size of books, etc.). And people don’t really seem to donate books on starting a business as often as they donate novels etc. so I don’t recall us having a lot of stuff on this topic at Book ‘Em. This past year I found a guide to entrepreneurship published by the state of Pennsylvania that seemed like a good introduction, and wasn’t too expensive to print/send (you can download the PDF on their website). Maybe other states have similar resources.

Today I discovered the website of ATHEN, the Access Technology Higher Education Network. There are some great articles about web accessibility on their site, and reading them got me all worked up about library resources and how difficult it is to ensure that databases – and probably also fancy “next gen” OPACs – are accessible. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and coincidentally last week I helped a patron with a vision impairment. She was using a database and had used the “Zoom In” (ctrl ++) feature in IE to make the text larger. Unfortunately the screen display (frames? ugh) in the database couldn’t handle this and most of the relevant links just disappeared. Everything looked normal when we reduced the text size/zoomed out, but then she couldn’t really read it. I started wondering how many library databases are easily navigable via screen readers, if they can be interpreted by them at all.

What constitutes web content? There are a few obvious answers to this question. The university’s main web site is a good starting point. A click or two of the mouse (or keyboard) can take users to the web sites of different departments, colleges, offices, projects, institutes, organizations, or other academic entities within the institution. Already, this constitutes thousands, or possibly millions, of pages of content. Adding to this list are things like online courses, supplemental online materials for classroom-based courses, library databases, library subscription services, campus intranet services, employee and student records, bookstore purchasing services, and the personal web sites of students and faculty. Some of these web-based resources are simple HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) files created by staff. Others are complex software products licensed from commercial vendors. In between these two extremes is an array of miscellaneous resources, such as word processor documents, slide shows, spreadsheets, videos, Java applets, etc. All of this is web content, and a holistic approach would seek to take it all into account.

With so much information and interactivity available now in a digital format, the sheer volume of resources that must be accessible is daunting, especially when including “legacy” (old) resources (Richards & Hanson, 2004). To make matters more difficult, higher education institutions do not have direct control over some of these resources. Institutions usually license proprietary learning management software, employee databases, bookstore “shopping cart” systems, library subscription services, web-based email services, online applications for grants and loans, and other products from third-party vendors. If these products have accessibility flaws, the institution can only hope that the vendor will eventually fix them, yet the institution is still required to ensure that it does not discriminate against people with disabilities. This type of dilemma is all too common.
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Many libraries also play a direct role in ensuring the accessibility of course content. Some instructors select journal articles or other library materials as a part of the required reading, and may ask the library to make these available online through an online library reserve system. All too often, libraries simply scan in the file as a graphic and post it in Adobe Acrobat PDF format. The problem with this method is not the Acrobat file format, which can produce accessible files. The main problem is that no technology can directly translate a graphic into synthesized speech, as required by users with blindness. Someone must first process the page with optical character recognition (OCR) software, proofread it, and correct any errors before the content is ready for screen reader users. The relative success of OCR software conversion is dependent upon factors like the visual clarity of the original document (contrast, sharpness), the font type (fancy font faces are problematic), the orientation of the text (diagonal or sideways text is difficult or impossible), and so on. A different kind of problem arises when the document is nothing more than a copy of a copy of a copy, as is sometimes the case. The indistinct text can make reading difficult or impossible for users with low vision, and can reduce readability for all users, whether they have disabilities or not. Again, the long-term solution is for publishers to make their content available in accessible electronic formats, but when electronic versions are not available, libraries must anticipate that some students will need scanned copies of materials converted into text. The library may decide to perform this conversion in-house, or work with student disability services and/or outside contractors to accomplish this goal.